(a departure from book reviews) thoughts on five years since she died

my 5th daughter, Kit, died of a rare heart condition (she had DiGeorge syndrome as well) Nov. 9, 2019

It hits me hardest the weeks before. How the weather changes and the color of the trees and the holidays and Halloween ghosts like the ones I cut from tape to stick her NG tube to her cheek.

I spent half of Halloween at her bedside where she lay sleeping and half taking my older four kids to a trunk-or-treat, all dressed in glittery costumes and eating too much candy. What a double life. And me not being there enough for either side of it. How do people manage affairs? I just can't imagine.

My mother bought Kit Frankenstein and black-cat socks for her newborn sized feet (she was six months old, nearly, so close, but never quite made it).

I've been thinking a lot lately about what death would be like--I imagine it is like when you are about to jump off a high diving board into the pool, and you are alittlebitnervous but also a little thrilled, and you know it will be hard when you land but once you jump there's no going back, you just have to step off, one quick decision.

But that's for me. For her, she was always (nearly always) sleeping so I hope (I think) it was maybe more like a drifting off from one dream to another dream, a better one.

I wish that was my one grief and life was rose-colored after that, but then came the second trimester miscarriages, both boys, one and then a year later, another. When I hoped for good, evil came, and when I waited for light, darkness came (Job 30:26). I must be feeling a bit melodramatic to commiserate with Job, but here we are. All the loss in those short years gets tangled up in my heart and mind. I tried to stop having faith. I laid in the hospital bed recovering from the second miscarriage and told God I was done. Done.

But then the world was heartbreakingly beautiful. And my living children’s pale freckled faces, and long talks with my husband, and the over-arching trees in our backyard. How can someone look at trees and not believe? And the scripture I’d memorized over the years kept coming back, unbidden, the hymns seeping up to the front of my mind. I didn’t (and don’t) understand, but I knew God loved me, somehow was not evil, and had not abandoned me, or my little daughter, or my unborn sons.

So here I am the person you know with probably the very worst faith. I sneer sometimes, literally sneer, at the thought of praying for healing or safety or anything good. Answered prayer. I held my little daughter while she died, and I still can’t understand how all that happened, and I’ve kept on writing these silly posts and drinking coffee and taking my kids to the library. I have nothing to say in Bible study, and sometimes my faith feels like so many motions while my heart is dead. My faith in God is like this tiny twig at the bottom of the woodpile, still glowing a bit in the dirt, some days.

I wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems about my children the past few years, trying to catch my breath. It isn’t the anniversary yet, but it’s close enough for me to feel it, so I’ll share one from the collection I’ve written about Kit, this poem about when I was still able to imagine that everything could be ok:

With Kit, Age 7, Outside the Hospital
- After William Stafford

We would walk out those glass doors
sighing open so easy at last,
the way the windows never moved
in the higher levels of the ICU,
and spring was just for looking at,
raging as it was with fair blue skies
and dots of daffodils between streets.

She would grip my hand
as I led her to our car,
pocketed in the dingy maze
of parking garage. Would she
ask every question, as I buckled
her in, of home, family, the life
she was beginning again,
like an Easter Sunday, like an Easter
lily, with her pale eager face?

I would grip the steering wheel
and drive as fast as I dared,
my child unaware of the death
that pursued her, and I pretending
it wasn’t with us even there.


(poem originally published in Contrary)

me with Kit, a few weeks before she died